Alex Kendall

Alfabetización mediática crítica en la postmodernidad

En este trabajo se reflexiona sobre las relaciones entre alfabetizacion, alfabetizacion mediatica y educacion para los medios, relacionandolas con los hallazgos de diferentes investigaciones etnograficas, a fin de proponer nuevas formas de practica para la alfabetizacion critica en los medios. Vivimos en la postmodernidad, en la era «despues de los medios» –y no es que ya no existan los medios–, sino que, por el contrario, surge una forma de pensar –y ensenar– que se resiste a la idea de considerar los medios como algo ajeno a la ciudadania en la vida cotidiana. Para el autor, la permanencia de preceptos y practicas anquilosadas sobre educacion en los medios dificulta la puesta en marcha de proyectos de alfabetizacion mediatica, al igual que una vision tradicionalista de la literatura genera practicas viciadas de lectura en el aula. La ensenanza formal de la lengua ha obstaculizado el desarrollo de lectores criticos y competentes, imponiendo un modelo de lector unidimensional. Igualmente, los estudios mediaticos han ensombrecido la alfabetizacion en los medios, subestimando la legitimidad del estudio de la cultura popular en si misma desde un punto de partida erroneo. La educacion en medios es aun una asignatura pendiente y requiere un cambio de perspectiva. En este articulo, fruto de investigaciones, se propone una «pedagogia del inexperto» como estrategia para la alfabetizacion critica en los medios.

Shaping up? Three acts of education studies as textual critique

This paper presents a study of dominant educational discourses through textual critique and argues that such an approach enables education studies to preserve an important distinction from teacher training. The texts deconstructed here are specific to English education, but the discourses at work have international relevance as the rhetorics of accountability, performance and measurement (which we call cells of discourse) have global reach. Ward described a national picture in England whereby the great majority, if not all, of education studies undergraduate courses appear to be taught alongside, or within (through shared modules) teacher training programmes. But from a sociological position, these are two increasingly conflicting arenas—the study of education and the training of teachers. In response, Ward called for the subject to radicalize teacher education. The implications of this are significant if education studies is to retain a status as agent of critique. In this paper we return to the theme of education studies as a discrete practice from teacher training and suggest that any acceptance of a proximal relation to teacher education is counter‐productive. In so doing we offer three contemporary examples of the subject at deconstructive work, scrutinizing the published standards for teacher training in England, employer discourse and the Tomlinson report (commissioned by the English government to offer proposals for the reworking of vocational education) and the new curriculum for adult literacy in England. Particular attention is given to analysing the ways in which such texts speak the currently powerful discourse of standards.

After the Media: Culture and Identity in the 21st Century

Acknowledgements Introduction: After the Media Chapter 1 Power after the media Chapter 2 Genre after the media Chapter 3 Representation after the media Chapter 4 Ideology after the media Chapter 5 Identity after the media Chapter 6 History after the media Chapter 7 Audience after the media Chapter 8 Narrative after the media: from narrative to reading Chapter 9 Technology after the media Conclusion Pedagogy after the media: towards a pedagogy of the inexpert References Index

Alfabetización mediática crítica en la postmodernidad = Critical Media Literacy after the Media

En este trabajo se reflexiona sobre las relaciones entre alfabetizacion, alfabetizacion mediatica y educacion para los medios, relacionandolas con los hallazgos de diferentes investigaciones etnograficas, a fin de proponer nuevas formas de practica para la alfabetizacion critica en los medios. Vivimos en la postmodernidad, en la era «despues de los medios» –y no es que ya no existan los medios–, sino que, por el contrario, surge una forma de pensar –y ensenar– que se resiste a la idea de considerar los medios como algo ajeno a la ciudadania en la vida cotidiana. Para el autor, la permanencia de preceptos y practicas anquilosadas sobre educacion en los medios dificulta la puesta en marcha de proyectos de alfabetizacion mediatica, al igual que una vision tradicionalista de la literatura genera practicas viciadas de lectura en el aula. La ensenanza formal de la lengua ha obstaculizado el desarrollo de lectores criticos y competentes, imponiendo un modelo de lector unidimensional. Igualmente, los estudios mediaticos han ensombrecido la alfabetizacion en los medios, subestimando la legitimidad del estudio de la cultura popular en si misma desde un punto de partida erroneo. La educacion en medios es aun una asignatura pendiente y requiere un cambio de perspectiva. En este articulo, fruto de investigaciones, se propone una «pedagogia del inexperto» como estrategia para la alfabetizacion critica en los medios.

Baudrillard and the end of education

In this paper we examine ideas around Baudrillard’s work on reality being a simulation, applying these ideas to educational research. We suggest that even rigorously devised quantitative forms of research, and the empirical data that such research produces, produce rather than simply report on reality; and that very often such research is complicit with naive assumptions about what education is and how education ought to be. We do not argue that such a process is intrinsically wrong but reflect on Baudrillard’s work which indicates that this state of affairs in inescapable.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever had discussions about reading’: a case study of FE literacy teachers’ conceptualisations of literacy

Research on reading in the lifelong-learning sector has tended to focus on the attitudes, habits and practices of the recipients of further education (FE), or the practices of literacy within the cultural and contextual environments of the subjects and spaces of further education. Although teachers’ conceptualisations of literacy are often acknowledged in this work to be central to the making and shaping of pedagogical practice, little research in the sector has attended specifically to teachers’ meaning-making about literacy. This approach is well developed in other phases where relationships between teachers’ classroom practices and their attitudes and values in relation to textual experience are seen as significant. In this paper we start this work for the post-compulsory sector. The FE Literacy Teachers as Readers Project aimed to explore teachers’ discursive understandings of reading through a qualitative study of their own accounts of their reading habits and preferences, their definitions of reading and the role of reading in their classrooms. Our discussion analyses our participants’ descriptions (figured worlds) of their own and their students’ reading identities to describe the positions they take up in relation to (‘big D’) discourses about readers and reading, and to consider how this might begin to pattern and frame their classroom practice. Coming a decade after the introduction of subject-specialist qualifications for literacy teachers in the FE sector, this study offers a timely insight in to teachers’ conceptualisation of reading in the context of well-embedded professional training, and one that is particularly pertinent at a time when the statutory training model for FE is under review.

Listening to old wives’ tales: small stories and the (re)making and (re)telling of research in HE/FE practitioner education

In this paper we share the outcomes of a project that sought to take up Nutbrown’s challenge to ‘push out from the safe(er) boundaries of established methodologies’ in early years research. We explore the value of auto-ethnographic storytelling, Lyotard’s ‘petit récit’, to the processes of doing and learning about research in the context of practitioner education. We offer a rationale for the use of creative methods in (post?) professional learning and describe the process of working with identity boxes and symbolic objects, to produce a collection of auto-ethnographic narratives, the old wives’ tales of the title, through which to explore practitioners’ experiences of professional identity formation. We consider the opportunities such methods offer for reflexive learning about practitioner positionality within the knowledge-making practices of research and attempt to (re)position ourselves differently as writers and makers of research. Towards a conclusion we review and theorise meanings participant-researchers make about their career trajectories and proffer auto-ethnography as a dynamic modality for practitioner learning. We mobilise Patti Lather’s notion of methodological proliferation to re-think practitioner education as a wild profusion of post-professional possibilities.

'How Will I Know When I'm Ready?' Re-Imagining FE/HE 'Transitions' as Collaborative Identity Work.

Abstract Drawing on the findings of a Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) funded, multi-institutional, regional project, Transitions West Midlands, this paper works with Further Education (FE) students’ transition narratives as they look forward to, and back from the move from FE to HE and explores the role of the local, contextual factors that impact on the student transition experience. We mobilise Reay et al’s notion of ‘institutional habitus’ to draw attention to the discourses about transition at play within the institutional context and explore how these function to pattern and frame students’ world figuring and concept making, about what ‘transition’ might be like. We notice the dominance of a nebulous but fixed/stable concept of skill acquisition, understood as ‘HE readiness’ that drives particular approaches to student identity work characterised by self-recognitions of deficit, not being ‘ready’ or ‘good enough’ to transition. Readiness, we contend, works paradoxically to background and under-value the assets, for example the resilience associated with managing competing demands and navigating complexity, that students might bring to ‘transition events’. We trace the reproduction of this mis-recognition in students’ reports of their interactions with teachers, which play out, in turn, equally limiting narratives of FE teacher identity. By way of response we suggest that re-imagining ‘transition’ as essentially social, a process of becoming, rather than skills acquisition might re-position students and their teachers as more active, agentic protagonists in the narratives they make, and make available, about what transition can and might mean. In this sense, working reflexively together to understand transition as identity work might enable students and teachers to recover, recognise and put to work the rich assortment of assets and resources that students bring to the process of FE/HE transition.

Getting lost (and found) in supervision: an ethnodrama

This paper aims to offer an innovative approach to reflecting on research and practice around doctoral study and supervision. In the opening section of the paper, the authors discuss the idea that academic development as a doctoral candidate is concerned with how researchers write themselves into being as certain kinds of researchers, and how, in doing so, they become a character, like their supervisors, in the “figured world” of their research. This process of “becoming” can, the authors argue, be nurtured or hindered by different kinds of supervision practices.,With regard to the authors’ own experiences of doctoral supervision, the paper explores how their use of post-qualitative practices and methodologies encouraged new forms of intersubjectivity and academic development as their supervisory relationship advanced alongside the thesis itself.,The authors present the script of an ethnodrama (Saldana, 2111) which they wrote and performed on a number of occasions, as an alternative way of expressing their experiences of being in a relationship as doctoral supervisor and supervisor.,This choice of ethnodrama emerged out of a frustration with what the authors felt were increasingly predictable ways of discussing and reflecting upon the philosophy, content and assessment methods of postgraduate research and supervision across the educational disciplines.,The authors hope that their exploration of the imaginative spaces created through doctoral supervision will encourage other postgraduates and their supervisors to experiment with working creatively across interdisciplinary spaces and creating radical and even risky ways of mediating and sharing postgraduate teaching and learning relationships.